The Apollo space programme is widely regarded as an inspirational triumph of the human spirit. It also contributed to science in two important ways. It improved our understanding of the origin and evolution of the solar system and it led to spin-off developments in technology.

Nevertheless the real significance of Apollo is rarely discussed. It is commonly acknowledged that the starting of Apollo by President John F. Kennedy in May 1961, with the aim of putting a man on the Moon by the end of the decade, was done primarily for reasons of national prestige. It would be a propaganda part of the ongoing geopolitical struggle with the Soviet Union. This goal of landing on the Moon was a massive technological challenge and, despite their subsequent claims to the contrary, it is now clear that in the early 1960s the Soviet Union also accepted Kennedy’s challenge.

The Soviet Union sent the first satellite, the first man and the first woman into orbit and was the first to hit the Moon with a man-made object. One of its cosmonauts, Aleksei Leonov, made the first space walk in 1965. America, stumbling at first, rapidly caught up and matched most Soviet achievements. It soon began achieving its own space firsts – the first docking in orbit and the successful flight of the giant Saturn V booster rocket.

A series of momentous events in late 1968 and early 1969 sealed the fate of the world’s first space race. In America, the successful Christmas flight of Apollo 8 into lunar orbit captured the imagination of the world. A few months later, the first Lunar Module was successfully tested in Earth orbit during the flight of Apollo 9. Putting a man on the Moon was finally achieved with the flight of Apollo 11 in July 1969.

In contrast, and largely unknown to the world until the 1990s, the Soviet Moon rocket, the gigantic N-1, a vehicle even larger than the American Saturn V, blew up twice. These disastrous failures, covered-up for 25 years, sealed the fate of the Soviet Moon programme. Without an operational booster rocket to deliver the spacecraft, no Soviet lunar mission was possible.

Although the usefulness of Apollo was debated endlessly in the Western press, which sometimes asked if a few Moon rocks were really worth $24 billion, what lessons did the Soviet Union draw? It became convinced that, technologically, America could accomplish anything. What effect did such a conclusion have on future actions? In 1983, another President, Ronald Reagan, called upon the scientific and technical community of the United States to develop a missile defence that would make America free from the fear of nuclear destruction.

This programme, the Strategic Defence Initiative (SDI, or “Star Wars” to its critics) was conceived to counter the prevailing strategic doctrine of “mutually assured destruction” (MAD), in which a nation would never start a nuclear war because it would fear its own destruction by retaliatory attack. The price of peace in a MAD scenario was to live in a state of permanent fear. The promise of SDI was to eliminate that fear.

SDI was criticized by many in the West, who thought it destabilizing. Numerous scientists said it was unachievable. Nonetheless the number one foreign policy objective of the Soviet Union in the last years of its existence was to eliminate SDI. The famous Reykjavik Summit of 1986 collapsed on this point, when Reagan would not trade SDI to Gorbachev in exchange for massive cuts in ballistic missiles.

Clearly, the Soviet Union was convinced the SDI could succeed. The reason for this belief was the success of Apollo. The Russians reasoned that getting into a competition with America on SDI would similarly end in an American victory and would be a race that would bankrupt and destroy their system. The success of the Apollo programme had given America something it did not realize was so important – technical credibility.